I honestly don’t know. It’s going to be a big problem. LLMs are capable of having this exact convo we’re having without giving away the game.

Some sort of personal vouching system? Ever changing “human tests”? I’m not sure it’ll be enough.

Everyone clustered on like 4 websites for convenience, and then browsing the internet started to feel like wandering around different sections of the same department store: sterile, corporate, advertiser-safe, and everything’s transactional. Plus, it made it incredibly easy for any party that wants to astroturf public opinion, because now they only have to set up shop on a few sites: botting comments, infiltrating moderator positions, abusing the algorithms.

We desperately need to break the internet’s monoculture, and I think federated social media like this is a great start.

I don’t imagine quitting the internet, but I can picture the internet fracturing into smaller sites with resistance to AI through obscurity - sort of similar to how we DO get occasional spam bots on Lemmy, but it largely isn’t worth bad actors’ time to target this platform.

Either that, or larger platforms with some sort of verification process, but that seems like a losing battle in the long run.

A lot of young men are lacking role models and community these days.

More kids are growing up without fathers around now (single parenthood is up from 9% in the 1960s to about 25% today).

Most people’s source of community used to be church, but since the advent of the internet, people are rapidly moving away from organized religion. I think this has disproportionately impacted men, who tend to be less social on average.

And I think in general, a lot of young men feel like nobody cares about their personal struggles.

So, even some toxic dude like Andrew Tate can show up and say “Hey, you’re great. Here are the reasons why things are bad for you and what you should do, and here’s a community of like-minded people to interact with.” and these guys are going to dive in head first.